By Jonah Raskin

HOW DO YOU deal with the suicide of a 45-year-old poet 55-years after he took leave of his life, leaving behind him a wealth of work both published and unpublished? If it’s the suicide of Lew Welch, you rally the faithful for a celebration of the man and his poems at the Counterculture Museum (CCM) on Haight Street in San Francisco. You do what friends and fans of Welch have been doing ever since that day in 1971 when he left a suicide note, grabbed a pistol, a Smith & Wesson .22. and wandered into the wilderness near Gary Snyder’s mountain home.

What do you do? There are choices. You can go into denial and insist that he’s still alive somewhere. Or else you accept his death as final, recite poems about him and for him and move on. Or alternatively you believe that there’s a continuing mystery about Welch’s death, that he’s another missing poet like Weldon Keyes, who vanished into thin air so to speak, his body like Lew’s never to be recovered and never to receive a proper burial.

Born in 1926, his musician stepson Huey Lewis, of Huey Lewis and the News, called him an ‘orator and a rock star with a musical voice’.

Pictured above: Lew Welch in 1968 at his home in Marin County

For the record, here’s the pithy suicide note which strikes me as a kind of Zen document: ‘I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor – use MSS at Gary’s and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America – use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don’t owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.’ He was kind enough to write a farewell for his friends.

It was a heavy occasion that recent night at the CCM, not only because it was the 100th anniversary of Welch’s birth, and a commemoration of his death, but also because the present weighed heavily on the presenters and the audience members. Peter Coyote of the Diggers, a movie star and the voice-over for many of Ken Burns’ documentaries, talked about ‘the mistakes we made’, but didn’t go into detail.

Not necessary. We knew what he had in mind. Coyote suggested that the death of the old American culture was ‘taking longer than we thought it would’, and that Ronald Reagan was ‘punishment for the excesses of the Sixties’. Coyote added that ‘historians can decide what we got right and what we got wrong.’

CCM co-founder Jerry Cimino observed that ‘history was a pendulum’ and that it had swung to an extreme opposite to the extremes of the Sixties. No one quoted William Blake who wrote that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ and that ‘You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.’ Welch tasted the extremes; he discovered what was too much, perhaps achieved a sense of wisdom, and then gave up.

I don’t want to hold him up as a tragic hero or as a victim of the times in which he lived and his own illusions. I’m not sure I even want to remember him for more than a few brief minutes, but I did want to share these observations with readers of Rock and the Beat Generation and let them know that, at the western edge of the continent of North America, a tribe of ‘Welch men and women’, as I’ll call them, convened to make sure that he won’t be forgotten.

A crossover figure who aimed to bridge the Beats and the hippies, folk music and rock, an alcoholic and an ecologist, Lew tried his hardest. Perhaps he didn’t fail at all, as he suspected, but came as close to the sun as any human could come.

By Pat Thomas

THERE HAS BEEN a wealth of new Allen Ginsberg books recently, including Ginsberg & Beat Fellows by Gordon Ball, Beat Dharma by Marc Olmsted, and Beatdom: Allen Ginsberg Centennial edited by David S. Wills. Now comes the anthology Allen Ginsberg in Context, edited by Erik Mortenson.

Thirty-one essays by various Ginsberg scholars, colleagues, and knowledgeable fans place Ginsberg’s poetry and life into a wide socio-political landscape. These essays are divided into five sections: ‘Early Years and Influences’, ‘Career Highlights’, ‘International Travels’, ‘Major Themes’, ‘Death and Afterlife’.

Erik Mortenson’s opening essay is a perfect overview of Allen’s oeuvre: ‘Internationally recognized poet, activist and advocate, spiritual seeker and drug experimenter, Buddhist Jew, provocateur and countercultural guru, supportive teacher and perpetual student.’ I adore his concise exploration into Ginsberg’s life and legacy. It bodes well for the rest of the book.

Ben Lee looks at the connections between Allen’s Beat poetry of the 1950s and the Marxists of the pre-war and post-war decades, arguing that ‘they constitute a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between the countercultural and experimental poetry movements that followed World War II and the Old Left-political cultures of the 1930s and early 1940s.’

Lee reminds us that Allen enrolled at Columbia in 1943 with the express desire to become an ‘honest revolutionary labor lawyer’. And while that path would have been righteous – I’m thinking Allen would have been ‘Mr. Integrity’ – in that position, it boggles to consider the poems and cultural influence we wouldn’t have gotten.

There are separate essays on Ginsberg’s connections to William Carlos Willams and Walt Whitman and, of course, William Blake. Luke Walker’s ‘Blake, Romanticism, and the Visionary’ breathes fresh air into a topic that has been discussed for decades including by Allen himself many times.

However, it’s here that I begin to wonder why nobody took on the role of discussing Allen’s spoken and/or sung recordings. Not just as a stand-alone essay but not even folded into individual writings where appropriate.

Yes, we have Steven Taylor (who accompanied Allen for decades on guitar on stage and in the studio) with his ‘First Blues: Music in the Life and Work of Allen Ginsberg’. A fab piece on Allen’s deep knowledge of music coupling what music influenced Allen (blues, jazz) with music that he inspired (folk, rock).

However, I would have loved an additional article from Taylor on Ginsberg’s own First Blues, a double album of singing/songwriting. All that said, it’s my only quibble about this entire 390-page volume. I am so passionate about Allen as a singer that, when I first met Steven in Manhattan a few years ago, I sincerely joked that for me it was like meeting Keith Richards!

Meanwhile, I add bonus points for the inclusion of an essay titled ‘The Vietnam War and Countercultural Activism’ by Steven Belleto. My own Ginsberg book Material Wealth included much on Allen’s August ’68 anti-war protests with the Yippies in Chicago and other related events. And Ginsberg figures prominently in my volume on Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, titled Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary.

There’s always room for more on Allen’s protests in the 1960s and Belleto also wisely discusses LSD in this section as well. That all folds nicely into the next chapter, ‘Into the Vortex: Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America’ by Jonah Raskin.

Raskin, who has penned books on Abbie Hoffman as well as on Ginsberg, lived through and understands the era covered in The Fall of America as well as the associated journals assembled by Michael Schumacher decades later. It’s this late 60s/early 70s era of Allen coupled with music (the Beatles, Dylan, etc.) and Yippies, Black Panthers, and more that keeps inspiring and driving my own work.

Ginsberg’s adventures in Mexico, Cuba, Prague, India and South America are all covered. And a 1984 trip to China that I was unaware of that David S. Wills of Beatdom fills us in on. Noted Ginsberg friend and aficionado Barry Miles takes us through Tangier and Paris at ‘The Beat Hotel’.

Stephan Paul Miller looks at Allen and T.S. Eliot and Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. Plus drugs get their own space via Marcus Boon.

Towards the end of the book, in a piece by Bill Mohr, ‘Recording the Body’s and the Body’s Politics’ Demise: Death & Fam’, I am overjoyed to encounter a section about Ginsberg’s song with Paul McCartney, ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’ – ah, finally. Now how about something on ‘Birdbrain’?!

One of the final pieces, ‘Ginsberg’s Archive’ by Bill Morgan (if you’re not familiar with his formidable research and writing, please stop reading this and go read one of his books), provides background on Allen’s impressive personal collection that eventually made its way to Stanford University and provided a home base for my own work on the poet.

Allen Ginsberg in Context is not just a read-it-and-chuck-it-aside book, but something that I will refer to often as a jumping off point for deeper dives to come. There’s a consistency to these various essays – which is their quality. Each appear to be thoroughly researched and clearly thought-out, not just tossed off. Thank you!

See also: ‘Book review #20: Material Wealth’, December 15th, 2023

So, what’s on the way? We have a piece about a 1960s music star who is the latest recipient of a Lifetime Beat Laureateship, a review of another Rolling Stone history, coverage of an intriguing title by a legendary rock lyricist, a notice and interview linked to Allen Ginsberg’s time spent in the north of England and fresh additions to our always popular ‘Beat Soundtrack’ exchanges.

A new collection of essays on Ginsberg gets the once-over from a leading critic, we showcase an extended interview in the ‘Generation Beat’ series as the founder of Beatdom talks to R&BG, an evocative essay returns us to the regal realm of Jim Morrison and Michael McClure, a live commemoration of a tragic Beat is reported and a hometown Neal Cassady centenary event is trailed. And there is more still in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, a small tweak to our subscriber arrangements…

We also want to thank you for your ongoing loyalty to Rock and the Beat Generation and share an important update about how our archive and community features will work going forward.

Our unique publication has covered the interlocking worlds of Beat literature and rock music for over five years. In that time, we have posted well over 600 articles – profiles and features, conversations, and correspondence – building a substantial historical archive.

Until now, all R&BG content has been available without fee, though some of our subscribers have voluntarily supported this project financially – a much-appreciated gesture. If you are already a paying subscriber, thank you: your account remains completely unchanged, and you automatically retain full access to everything.

Now we want to advise you of an updated arrangement regarding site subscriptions. To support and expand the quality of our coverage, underpin the sustainability of the archive and fuel the next stage in our plans, we are making a small change starting in September 2026:

• 14-day free access: All newly published articles will remain 100% free to read for two weeks

• The R&BG archive: After 14 days, posts move into our permanent archive, accessible exclusively to paid subscribers

• Community conversation: Commenting and discussion, exclusive chat and interactive features, on all posts will now be reserved for paid subscribers to foster a dedicated community space

Support R&BG and unlock the archive

Furthermore, we are aiming to add extra content for those taking out a paid subscription in the months to come and look out, too, for news to follow regarding the first book to emerge from this web project entitled The Best of Rock and the Beat Generation, a paperback edition which will emerge through independent publisher Mystic Boxing Commission, based in Los Angeles.

Do consider joining this new phase in R&BG’s life. Sign up as a paying subscriber and retain full access to our significant library and make sure you can add remarks below the line to our posts, if you wish. If you cannot or do not, can we thank you warmly for remaining a reader of this one-of-a-kind web venture.

If you have any a further query or comment about these new arrangements or remarks or suggestions concerning our coverage and would like to feed into our inbox, do please contact us at simonwarner@substack.com

In the meantime, enjoy our new season of exciting fresh content.

Simon Warner, Founding Editor

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Rock and the Beat Generation will suspend publication of fresh content during August as we take our summer break.

Don’t feel abandoned, however: over 600 articles sit ready and waiting to be investigated in our five years of archives.

Go to ‘Archive’ on the publication’s home page for more recent additions or search for older articles, using…

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By Don Heneghan

GINSBERG & BEAT Fellows is more than a collection of photographs of Ginsberg and friends and the Beat literary circle. It is a story of Gordon Ball’s growth as an artist, teacher, a family man. His earlier coming of age stories …

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By Simon Warner

A CELEBRATION of Allen Ginsberg in London town at one of the great city venues? It’s hard not to think of that earlier occasion at the Albert Hall when a British social revolution was kickstarted by the leading Beat poet, his illustrious foot soldiers and a sell-out crowd.

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In the latest extension, we are pleased to showcase books involving Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs,…

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Reviewed by Jonah Raskin, Chief Book Reviewer

ALL OF US KNOW or think we know, if we belong to the extended Beat family, all there is to know about Jack Kerouac: how he came from a working class Catholic …

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IT FEELS LIKE we have been celebrating quite a rush of big anniversaries this year in the digital pages of Rock and the Beat Generation. Barely a. week has gone by without a timely commemoration of some description, literary or musical.

It was, you will remember, Neal Cassady’s centenary in February, John Coltrane an…

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By Jonah Raskin, Chief Book Reviewer

THE BEATDOM centennial volume devoted to Allen Ginsberg’s life and work arrived in my mailbox at the end of a month-long series of events paying homage to the life and the work of a poet, much maligned in academia for decades, but heral…

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By Simon Warner

FIFTY YEARS ago, I remember scudding about the pinball arcade of our college campus and there was a notable figure in that same corridor also looking for the meaning of life but having to make do with the sound of the mechanical clunk generated by the replay func…

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ON A COLD October morning in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, riffling through the disordered second hand books at an outdoor stall in the city’s Leidseplein, I came across Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, his only novel to be published in his lifetime, for the first time.

Gleefully, I believed I had happened upon a…

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ARTEFACTS ASSOCIATED with Jack Kerouac have retained a lasting interest for collectors, not to mention auctioneers, who continue to see great value in objects that possess a personal aura, building on that potent cult of celebrity, which still resonates long, long after the writer’s death in 1969.

Joyce Johnson, the 90-year-old New York Ci…

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By Jonah Raskin

ALLEN GINSBERG performed his poetry in London, New York, Chicago, Prague and in other cities around the world, but his relationship with San Francisco stood out from all the others, not because he loved San Francisco more than any other place but rather because he wrote ‘Howl’

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By Simon Warner

SOUP GLORIOUS SOUP? Or maybe not so glorious. Very recently the poet Sharon Mesmer, a student of Allen Ginsberg’s in the 1990s at Brooklyn College, described an encounter with a bowl of soup that her distinguished teacher had offered her during a tutorial in his Lower East …

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